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Author: Mike LaChance

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Mike LaChance

Mike LaChance has been covering higher education and politics for Legal Insurrection since 2012. He has also written for American Lookout, Townhall, and Twitchy.

Since 2008 he has contributed work to the Daily Caller, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, the Center for Security Policy, the Washington Free Beacon, and Ricochet.

Mike is a Generation X, New England lifer who describes his political views as conservative and libertarian.

You can find him on Twitter @MikeLaChance33

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 13, 2014 9 Comments
Last night on Special Report with Bret Baier, Charles Krauthammer offered commentary on Elizabeth Warren's very theatrical protest of the so-called Cromnibus. Things are a little different now that a Democrat is objecting to a government funding bill. Transcript via National Review:
What should one think of Elizabeth Warren’s brinksmanship over the cromnibus bill last night? “Spectacular hypocrisy, a festival of hypocrisy,” says Charles Krauthammer. “And, of course, the media loves it when it’s a liberal Democrat who leads the fight, she’s a ‘principled’ politician,” Krauthammer said on Friday’s Special Report. “Whereas when it’s Ted Cruz, he’s a terrorist, essentially.” Although Krauthammer is not convinced that Warren will run in 2016, “her star is rising,” he said, “and the hero worship of the media is beginning. This sort of sounds and feels a bit like the early Obama years, between 2004 and 2008.
Here's the video, via the Washington Free Beacon: Krauthammer noted that if Warren is running for president, this was the moment she launched her campaign.

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 12, 2014 11 Comments
Democrats speak out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to campaign finance laws. They say they want big money out of American politics but they'll stop at nothing to raise big money to install Hillary Clinton as America's next president. Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon reports how that goal may have resulted in a violation of law:
Pro-Hillary PAC Accused of Illegal Activity in FEC Lawsuit An anti-Hillary Clinton PAC filed a lawsuit on Thursday to compel the Federal Election Commission to determine whether the pro-Clinton Super PAC Ready for Hillary is violating campaign finance laws. The Stop Hillary PAC originally filed a complaint with the FEC in January, claiming that Ready for Hillary may be illegally conducting authorized campaign activity on behalf of Hillary Clinton. According to the complaint, Ready for Hillary used an email list owned by Hillary Clinton’s Senate committee to send out fundraising letters. Ready for Hillary also allegedly sent out the solicitations using the email address [email protected]—a website that the complaint says is owned by Clinton’s authorized committee. The Ready for Hillary email stated “now is the time to get our support for Hillary organized and ready for 2016,” according to the lawsuit.

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 11, 2014 14 Comments
Senator Mitch McConnell has characterized the new CIA report on "torture" as a last ditch effort by outgoing Democrats to stick their thumb in the eye of the George W. Bush administration and of course, he's right. Where were all these Democrats when Obama was pulverizing suspected terrorists into dust with drones if they happened to be on his personal kill list? It's convenient for Obama to kill terrorists with drones because they're enemy combatants he'll never have to place in Gitmo. Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed by Bret Baier on FOX News Wednesday night and was asked about the highly partisan CIA "torture" report. He didn't hold back: Dick Cheney understands something Obama will never get. People want to know the truth, no matter how ugly it is.

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 09, 2014 23 Comments
As we reported over the weekend, Lena Dunham's account of being sexually assaulted by a Republican student at Oberlin is the other collapsing campus rape story. New details are emerging which cast a longer shadow of doubt over Dunham's claims. According to a new report from Paul Bond of the Hollywood Reporter, Dunham's publisher is going to alter the language in her book:
Publisher to Alter Lena Dunham Book After Rape Story Questioned, Attorney Says The publisher of Lena Dunham's book, Not That Kind of Girl, will tweak a passage where the star and creator of the Girls TV show describes how she was raped in college by a Republican named "Barry," an attorney for the man told The Hollywood Reporter on Monday. Attorney Aaron Minc said he has been in contact with Dunham's lawyers at Ziffren Brittenham in Los Angeles who assure him that future printings of the book, subtitled "A young woman tells you what she's 'learned,' " will come with a disclaimer that "Barry" is not the real name of the man who raped Dunham when the two were students at Oberlin College a decade ago.
In an even more explosive development, Random House has offered to pay the legal fees for the accused man known only as "Barry One."

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 07, 2014 11 Comments
In his weekly column at the Washington Post, George Will points out something that a number of progressives are beginning to notice. Big government doesn't look out for the little guy:
Government for the strongest Intellectually undemanding progressives, excited by the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — advocate of the downtrodden and the Export-Import Bank — have at last noticed something obvious: Big government, which has become gargantuan in response to progressives’ promptings, serves the strong. It is responsive to factions sufficiently sophisticated and moneyed to understand and manipulate its complexity. Hence Democrats, the principal creators of this complexity, receive more than 70 percent of lawyers’ political contributions. Yet progressives, refusing to see this defect — big government captured by big interests — as systemic, want to make government an ever more muscular engine of regulation and redistribution. Were progressives serious about what used to preoccupy America’s left — entrenched elites, crony capitalism and other impediments to upward mobility — they would study “The New Class Conflict,” by Joel Kotkin, a lifelong Democrat. The American majority that believes life will be worse for the next few decades — more than double the number who believe things will be better — senses that 95 percent of income gains from 2009-2012 went to the wealthiest 1 percent.
This is a lesson America has to re-learn every generation or so. Remember the famous Obama supporter Peggy Joseph who happily declared that an Obama presidency meant that she would no longer have to pay for her gas or mortgage? She has a somewhat different view now.

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 06, 2014 26 Comments
The crumbling of Rolling Stone's story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia is sending shock waves through the media this weekend but there's another rape story which is also now being questioned. Lena Dunham of the HBO program 'Girls' claimed in her recent memoir 'Not That Kind of Girl' that she was raped by a Republican student while attending Oberlin. Breitbart News has conducted an extensive investigation of her claim and the facts are coming up short. John Nolte reports:
INVESTIGATION: Lena Dunham ‘Raped by a Republican’ Story in Bestseller Collapses Under Scrutiny After a month-long investigation that included more than a dozen interviews, a trip to the Oberlin campus, and hours spent poring through the Oberlin College archives, her description of the campus remains the only detail Breitbart News was able to verify in Dunham's story of being raped by a campus Republican named Barry. On top of the name Barry, which Dunham does not identify as a pseudonym (more on the importance of this below), Dunham drops close to a dozen specific clues about the identity of the man she alleges raped her as a 19-year-old student. Some of the details are personality traits like his being a “poor loser” at poker. Other details are quite specific. For instance, Dunham informs us her rapist sported a flamboyant mustache, worked at the campus library, and even names the radio talk show he hosted. To be sure we get the point, on three occasions Dunham tells her readers that her attacker is a Republican or a conservative, and a prominent one at that -- no less than the "campus's resident conservative." For weeks, and to no avail, using phone and email and online searches, Breitbart News was able to verify just one of these details.
Nolte's report is long but worth reading in full. Breitbart's investigative work was so thorough that Eugene Volokh of the Washington Post is already entertaining a scenario in which the accused man identified as 'Barry' could sue Dunham.

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 06, 2014 17 Comments
In a new edition of Afterburner, Bill Whittle examines the ways in which an enemy attack could shut down our power grid. This is a major national security issue. A lack of electricity for an extended period of time would devastate any country. Maybe we should keep an eye on Detroit.

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 05, 2014 48 Comments
In her sparsely attended speech at Georgetown University this week, Hillary Clinton gave attendees a glimpse of her views on foreign policy and national defense by saying America should empathize with its enemies. This leads to a natural question: How does one "empathize" with ISIS terrorists who are currently beheading and crucifying their way across the Middle East? Ed Morrissey of Hot Air:
It’s difficult to know where to start with this nonsense from a recent speech given by Hillary Clinton, in which the presumed Democratic front-runner finally defines what she sees as “smart power,” and what she claims is a 21st-century approach to diplomacy. In large part, the former Secretary of State says it means psychoanalyzing enemies to understand them better, which … is exactly what nations have been doing for centuries, if not millenia.
Watch the video: This world view reminds me of another Democrat who's not running in 2016:

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 04, 2014 24 Comments
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio appeared on Greta Van Susteren's program last night to discuss a new fold in the ongoing scandal at the Internal Revenue Service. Would it surprise you to learn that the IRS shared confidential taxpayer information with the White House? Video courtesy of the Gretawire blog: Not to worry America. We're living under the most transparent administration in American history. Or maybe not.

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 03, 2014 5 Comments
As politics and media have continued to obsess about Ferguson, a very serious thing has occurred. Our national debt topped $18 trillion dollars. That's more than our GDP. John Hinderaker of Powerline reports:
Federal Debt Soars to Over $18 Trillion A year or so ago, the Democrats started telling us that the national debt was no longer an issue. This was based on the fact that the deficit was only around half what it was during President Obama’s first few years in office. The fiscal year 2014 deficit came in at *only* $483 billion, a cause for rejoicing in Washington. This represents the smallest deficit as a percentage of GDP since the George W. Bush administration. Still, $483 billion exceeds any deficit ever racked up during the administration of any president other than Barack Obama. (Don’t try to play the silly game of attributing the Democratic Congress’s FY 2009 deficit, which among other things included spending under the failed Obama/Reid/Pelosi “stimulus,” to President Bush.) Word came today that the national debt now exceeds $18 trillion, a little more than the GDP of the United States.
Remember all the times Obama said he was going to cut our deficit in half? Dan Spencer of RedState does:
Our ‘Irresponsible’ and ‘Unpatriotic’ $18 Trillion National Debt

Posted by Mike LaChance on November 30, 2014 23 Comments
With the midterms over, both parties are turning their focus to 2016. Democrats, who were the clear losers on November 4th are struggling over leadership and the direction of their party. It's hard to imagine Elizabeth Warren harshly criticizing the Obama administration just a few years ago. The age of Obama is over. Peter Schroeder of The Hill:
Democrats assail Wall Street ties in Obama administration President Obama’s nomination of Antonio Weiss to serve as the Treasury Department’s top domestic finance official is drawing fire from an unusual sector: his fellow Democrats. Liberal lawmakers like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have been quick to oppose Weiss, a major investment banker with Lazard. Among their grievances is the fact that Lazard’s work is primarily in international finance and he is nominated for a domestic position. They’re also critical of his role in structuring several tax inversion deals, which have drawn criticism from the president himself. But an underlying thread to the Democratic opposition is a fatigue with filling top-ranking administration spots with officials that have spent significant time working for or on behalf of Wall Street titans. Warren penned an op-ed in The Huffington Post criticizing the administration’s approach under the headline “Enough is Enough.”
The discord isn't limited to the Warren wing of the party. There's plenty of scorn to go around.

Posted by Mike LaChance on November 29, 2014 0 Comments
It's easy to forget how many stupid things Democrats have said over the last year. Fortunately, David Rutz of the Washington Free Beacon has put them all together:
Turkeys The Worst of the Democrats in 2014 The Democratic Party had a really bad 2013. Somehow, it got worse. President Obama admitted in August that “we don’t have a strategy yet” in battling the terrorist group known as the Islamic State, just months after dismissing the organization as a mere “JV team.” Vice President Joe Biden, in an impressive feat even for him, managed to offend Jews and Asians in the span of one day, and he also referred to Africa as a “nation.” Soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) also offended Asians when he joked he had trouble “keeping my Wongs straight” at the Asian Chamber of Commerce, and he also made headlines this year with his bizarre rants about the philanthropist Koch brothers. Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.) stepped in controversy when she remarked Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had “given women the back of his hand.” It didn’t work in dissuading voters; Walker won his third election in four years.
Here's the blooper reel:
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